Potable water is at a premium today throughout the United States due to shortage of rainfall in recent years. Reservoirs in various parts of the country are well below capacity with little relief in sight. The long range water outlook is rather bleak. All levels of public and private enterprise have urged reduction in water use, where possible, with particular attention being paid to those areas where use of potable water is not essential and might be easily replaced by use of non-drinking water.
One area where unbelievably large amounts of potable water are unnecessarily employed is in the flushing of convention toilets where some 4 to 7 gallons of potable water are consumed with each flush of the toilet. The action of flushing a conventional toilet actuates means for disengaging and unseating a float-closure means from an opening in the bottom of the toilet tank. Water in the tank then drains through the opening to flush the toilet. The flush is not completed until practically the entire volume of water filling the tank (that is, 3.5 to 6.5 gallons) is drained and consumed. When the level of water in the tank is reduced to substantially the bottom of the tank, the float-closure means is made to close or seat over the opening in the tank and water is made to run into the tank to fill same for the next flush.
In most countries outside the United States, non-potable water is employed for such purpose. However, in the United States, with its normal abundance of potable water, it has until now been unthinkable to use anything but potable water for flushing a toilet. With public resistance to using non-drinkable water for toilet flushing being substantial, thoughts have turned to other techniques for saving water by reducing the amount of water normally employed in a flush. Thus, one solution has been to place one or more bricks in the tank to reduce the water-holding capacity of the tank and thereby reduce the amount of water used in the flush. Unfortunately, this method has been found to be unsatisfactory in that constant flow of water in contact with the bricks erodes the bricks with the result that particles of aggregate and brick soil the tank and tend to clog the orifice in the bottom of the tank.
Other apparatus and techniques for reducing the amount of water normally consumed in a flush are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,960,864 to Brown, 2,237,294 to Easley, 2,754,521 to Marcum, 3,153,247 to Walsh, 3,380,077 to Armstrong, 3,839,746 to Kowalski, 4,080,669 to Biggerstaff, 4,086,667 to Miklos, 4,225,987 to Goldman et al., and 4,232,408 to Lee Chen-Yuan.